We talk a lot about "community" in the open source world. But what does that mean? How do we keep our communities healthy? As other communities have started to learn from the way open source communities work, what can we in turn be learning from them?

Inspired by the Community Leadership Summit run each year before OSCON, Donna Benjamin will convene CLSx at LCA to bring together community leaders, organisers and managers and the projects and organisations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. We invite the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.

As an open unconference-style event, everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any relevant topic.

The Community Leadership Summit began in 2009 in Portland, Oregon, USA, and has grown to be a key fixture on the open source event calendar. CLS was conceived and is organised each year by Jono Bacon. He is now Senior Director of Community at XPRIZE, and formerly community manager for the global Ubuntu community and author of The Art of Community by O’Reilly.

Jono started the summit as a first step in helping community managers and leaders to define and refine their work, share knowledge and make connections in a vendor neutral way. And now, CLS is going global. CLSx events are local CLS style events that happen in locations around the world.